U.S. Rep. Allyson Schwartz, who won a fifth term in Congress in November 2012, is giving up her seat in order to run for governor. Due to redistricting, the 13th Congressional District is considered “safely Democratic,” according to an event flier, meaning the winner of the Democratic primary election May 20 is expected to be the next U.S. representative.

The debate, sponsored by Montgomery County Democracy for America and the Area 6 Democratic Committee, offered members of the public a chance to listen to the candidates and judge their opinions on the issues currently facing the country. Moderating the event was Philadelphia Daily News writer Will Bunch and topics were wide-ranging and included income inequality, health care and education.

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On income inequality, each candidate supported raising the minimum wage.

Leach said there had to be a balance between those with so much and those with absolutely nothing. He proposed a mandatory paid family leave, increasing Social Security and student loan reform to allow interest-free student loans.

“The average person in the 1 percent, their income has tripled,” he said. “While the average person in the bottom 20 percent, their income hasn’t gone up at all in real dollars in the last 30 years.”

Boyle said if elected, he’d introduce legislation that would attack discrimination against the long-term unemployed.

“Attacking the problem of chronic long-term unemployment must be done,” he said. “I have a bill that would say employers would no longer be allowed to discriminate against those who’ve been unemployed. Right now they can actually put in their ads that say, ‘if you’ve been out of work a certain amount of time do not even apply; we will not consider you.’”

Arkoosh, an obstetric anesthesiologist, said she sees patients every day who can’t afford healthy food, to pay the rent, to get to doctors visits or public transportation.

She proposed doing more to help entire families, not just a single adult, through an increase in the minimum wage. She also suggested correcting the tax structure for individuals and corporations.

“Tax rates for the highest earners among us are the lowest they’ve been in this country,” she said. “To me, that is simply unacceptable.”

On health care, each candidate admitted the rollout of the Affordable Care Act, better known as Obamacare, could have been handled better but it wasn’t a reason to give up on reforming health care.

Arkoosh and Leach said they both support a single-payer system in which the government pays for health care costs, rather than private insurers. Leach even went as far as to say the single-payer system was “an eventuality.” Boyle, meanwhile, said he prefers the public option, because he feels by letting consumers decide their health care provider, it keeps private insurance companies honest.

On education, the candidates were divided about the issue of school vouchers that would allow parents to send their child to a private school through funding from the government.

Boyle said his wife is a public school teacher in Montgomery County and said he was proud of his record on public education. He supported legislation under former Gov. Ed Rendell that brought funding to education to “historic highs” while opposing Gov. Tom Corbett’s budget that slashed funding to education. He admitted that while 80 to 90 percent of schools in the state were doing well, the education problems are focused in the 10 percent of schools not doing well.

“The question is: do I support additional options for those parents? Absolutely I do,” he said, in favor of the voucher program. “The public school in the neighborhood where I grew up had a 30 percent graduation rate — 30 percent. I don’t think it’s right for anyone to sit out on the Main Line and deny further opportunities to those families than they had for themselves.”

Arkoosh said while she supports the voucher program, she doesn’t support programs that defund public schools and puts it into other programs.

“Maybe a separate budget item,” she said. “But money cannot come from the public school budget.”

Leach said he was proud to lead the fight against the voucher program.

“Under Senate Bill 1, which is the voucher bill, the only kids who were eligible were the kids who were in failing schools,” he said. “There were 144 failing schools. They were also the 144 poorest schools in Pennsylvania. You think that’s a coincidence? I don’t think that’s a coincidence.

“So the way it worked was a kid left a school and took whatever we were paying on average per kid for that school and gave it to him to take to another school through a voucher. But of course if it’s $10,000 a kid, the school doesn’t save $10,000 because the kid left, most of the costs are fixed, which means all the kids who are left have even fewer resources.”

Boyle retaliated by saying he couldn’t turn his back on a single mother who feared for her child’s safety at a dangerous public school and would rather the voucher program send that child to a safe school.

Leach said the tragedy of the voucher program is that mother wouldn’t even be helped. The program would continue to take money out of public schools to show they continue to fail in order to shut them down.